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A Photographer's Collection

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A Photographer's Collection A Photographer’s Collection: Gifts from Michael and Michele Marvins For more than three decades, the Department of Photography at this Museum has benefited from the enlightened philanthropy of the Marvins family. The gift and promised gift of more than four hundred photographs from the collection of Mike and Mickey Marvins, celebrated here, is a most welcome capstone to that history. As with any collection, theirs reflects a constellation of experiences lived, lessons learned, tastes refined, connections nurtured, and opportunities seized. Mike Marvins’s understanding of the history of photography and his sense of connoisseurship—his recognition of what makes a compelling photograph and a beautiful print—are inextricably linked to his heritage as a fourth-generation professional photographer and his lifelong experience behind the camera. That insider’s perspective gives the collection its unique character. Marvins began with the idea of collecting canonical photographs, and to that end he acquired the work of mid-20th-century masters, including Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, André Kertész, and Edward Weston. Fortunately, he also followed his own passion and judgment, even when the works he loved bucked fashion or were scorned by other collectors at the time. As a result, the Marvins collection includes strong examples of American and European Pictorialist photography by Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edward Sheriff Curtis, Adolf Fassbender, Gertrude Käsebier, Heinrich Kühn, and others now recognized as key players in the medium’s development. This exhibition presents only a small portion of the collection’s treasures, grouped in four themes: of character expressed in portraiture; of qualities of light; of the infinite space of the world; and of the real and imaginary realms of childhood. The richness and variety of the photographs that Mike and Mickey Marvins have collected and are so generously donating to the Museum ensure that many more will find a place on these gallery walls in other thematic, aesthetic, and historical contexts in the years to come. Fellow Man, the Most Common and Complex of Photographic Subjects Of the trillion photographs estimated to have been taken last year, the largest portion shows people—friends out for a drink, the daily exploits of a new family member, a selfie someplace notable or mundane. The desire to record and share our own features and those of our loved ones has been an overwhelming impulse since photography’s invention. From childhood, we learn to read character and mood from the most subtle aspects of pose and facial expression, and the best portrait photographers have learned to understand and speak that language with particular skill and intelligence. Many photographers travel the world in search of exotic locales or sites of uncommon beauty, but others throughout the course of photography’s history have found in the faces of their fellow man the medium’s most subtle and challenging subject, an opportunity for collaborative expression, and photography’s most cherished role. Unknown artist [Portrait of a Woman] c. 1855 Daguerreotype The Sonia Marvins Collection, gift of Sonia Marvins 2003.516 When first presented to the public in 1839, daguerreotypes—one-of-a-kind photographs on highly polished, silver-plated sheets of copper—were thought to be impractical for portraiture. Improvements to the process soon shortened exposure times, however, and all but a few of the many millions of daguerreotypes produced in the 1840s and 1850s showed the faces of men and women of all stripes. In America, daguerreotypes were most often presented in leather (or later, thermoplastic) cases, just as painted portrait miniatures had been a generation earlier. Although it is now impossible to identify the artist or sitter for many, if not most, surviving daguerreotypes, the miraculous precision of this first photographic process, the artistry with which the best daguerreotypists composed their scenes, and the expressive qualities of the sitters all make these mirrorlike portraits compelling nonetheless. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston A Photographer’s Collection: Gifts from Michael and Michele Marvins April 4–July 5, 2015 William Henry Fox Talbot, British, 1800–1877 Bust of Patroclus 1843 Salted paper print from paper negative, printed later Promised gift of Mike and Mickey Marvins TR:1319-2012.137 When William Henry Fox Talbot first announced his process for paper photography in 1839, the process required exposures too long to be practical for portraiture; his new art was better suited to subjects that did not move—landscape, architecture, or still life. Talbot’s plaster cast of a Hellenistic marble bust of Achilles’s comrade Patroclus provided an animated and expressive substitute for the live model, and he photographed it more than forty-five times between 1839 and 1843, when this version was made. This particular print was once plate 17 in a copy of Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, the first photographically illustrated book, published in parts between 1844 and 1846. Although Talbot’s improved process was by then capable of recording portraits, he included none in his volume, but instead chose two photographs of this plaster bust. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston A Photographer’s Collection: Gifts from Michael and Michele Marvins April 4–July 5, 2015 André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, French, 1819–1889 Count and Countess Tyszkiewicz 1860 Albumen silver print from glass negative Gift of Mike and Mickey Marvins 2014.934 In 1854, A. A. E. Disdéri patented a system for cheaply and quickly producing cartes de visite—photographs the size of a visiting card, exposed eight per glass-plate negative, developed and printed as a unit, then cut into eighths and mounted to cards for distribution to friends and family. This rare, uncut sheet from the Disdéri archive shows how various poses could be captured on a single negative with a multi-lens camera. His system was widely adopted by other photographers in the years and decades that followed, bringing photographic portraiture within the grasp of nearly everyone, whether a count and countess or a cook. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston A Photographer’s Collection: Gifts from Michael and Michele Marvins April 4–July 5, 2015 Mathew B. Brady, American, 1823–1896 Mr. & Mrs. General Tom Thumb in their Wedding Costume 1863 Albumen silver print from glass negative Promised gift of Mike and Mickey Marvins 2014.928 The wedding of Charles S. Stratton (also known as “General Tom Thumb”) and Lavinia Warren at New York’s Grace Church on February 10, 1863, was a lavish event, promoted wildly—and profitably—by their employer, P. T. Barnum, at whose American Museum on Broadway the diminutive couple starred. Brady’s cartes de visite of the two in their wedding attire, undoubtedly issued by the thousands, were sold as souvenirs by Stratton and Warren as they toured the world in the years that followed. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston A Photographer’s Collection: Gifts from Michael and Michele Marvins April 4–July 5, 2015 André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, French, 1819–1889 [Carte-de-visite Album] c. 1870–1910 48 albumen silver prints from glass negatives Promised gift of Mike and Mickey Marvins TR:1040-2014 Just as people “friend” one another on Facebook today, family and friends in the second half of the 19th century exchanged carte-de-visite portraits and gathered them in albums that were manufactured to hold the standard-size, mass-produced cards. Portraits of celebrities and royalty were often interspersed with true kin, as more common folk hoped some of the luster might rub off on them. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston A Photographer’s Collection: Gifts from Michael and Michele Marvins April 4–July 5, 2015 American [Gem tintype album] c. 1850–1910 94 tintypes Promised gift of Mike and Mickey Marvins TR:1037-2014 Even as the daguerreotype process died out in the 1850s, its cheaper and more durable cousin, the tintype, continued to be popular for decades. At the low end, as in the coin-size “gem” tintypes in the album displayed to the right, the products of itinerant artisans or run-of-the-mill studios exhibited little artistry but still provided people with a treasured record of their own faces or those of loved ones. At the high end, great care was given to the studio setup, the posing, and the preparation of the finished product, as in this beautiful tintype of three children dressed in their Sunday finest and bound together as a family unit through their poses. The photographer or his assistant has given a touch of extra life and richness with a hint of rouge retouching on the cheeks and a sparkle of gold on the pendant, ring, and watch fob. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston A Photographer’s Collection: Gifts from Michael and Michele Marvins April 4–July 5, 2015 Unknown artist [Three Children] c. 1850–1910 Tintype Promised gift of Mike and Mickey Marvins TR:1035-2014 The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston A Photographer’s Collection: Gifts from Michael and Michele Marvins April 4–July 5, 2015 Unknown artist [Woman with Horse] no date Cyanotype Promised gift of Mike and Mickey Marvins TR:1319-2012.293 By the end of the 19th century, commercial and artistic photographers had been joined by the first wave of amateur snapshooters armed with handheld cameras and roll film. The informality and authenticity of such snapshots now seem like a charming contrast to the work of skilled professionals. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston A Photographer’s Collection: Gifts from Michael and Michele Marvins April 4–July 5, 2015 Gertrude Käsebier, American, 1852–1934 Nancy and Bubby at Five Months 1900 Platinum print Gift of Mike and Mickey Marvins 2013.715 At the turn of the century, Gertrude Käsebier was among the country’s leading Pictorialists, as fine art photographers then called themselves, and the first issue of Alfred Stieglitz’s lavishly produced and influential journal Camera Work in 1903 was devoted to her work.
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